This can’t be good:

Iran said Monday it had confiscated three British naval vessels and arrested eight armed crew members. …

The three British ships entered Iranian territorial waters not far from the Iran-Iraq border, the Arabic language Al-Alam television reported.

“Iranian forces confiscated the ships and eight military personnel on board,” the report said.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi confirmed the report, according to Iran’s main Persian language TV channel.

“Interrogation of those detained will continue until the matter is clarified,” Asefi was quoted as saying.

Yeah, well, something tells me Tony Blair will “clarify” matters if the mullahs aren’t careful.

“I’m half Irish and half Lebanese, so you know what that means: I’m a drunken terrorist.” –some stand-up comic

BoiFromTroy has lots of gay-pride parade pictures from L.A., including this one of himself with Mayor Jim Hahn:

I’m guessing Hahn hasn’t read about Boi’s mayoral preference. :)

Anyway, check out Boi’s homepage. He’s got lots of pride pictures; just keep scrolling. Don’t miss this ironic pic (heh). And here are some gay Trojans. (My only question: Where are the lesbians?)

UPDATE: As long as we’re on the topic of gay-pride parades, check out my pictures from New York’s parades in 2000 and 2003.

Even breeders can have pride!

Adrienne liked Dodgeball. She’s not the only one: the Ben Stiller flick topped Tom Hanks’s The Terminal, $30 million to $18.7 million. So Spielberg finishes #2. Actually, The Terminal just barely edged Harry Potter, which, in its third week, grossed $17.4 million.

The weekend’s really, really big bomb is Disney’s Around the World in 80 Days, which finished ninth in its opening weekend, grossing a feeble $9.6 milion. It cost $110 million to make. Ouch.

Shrek 2, meanwhile, has moved up to #6 on the all-time list of top-grossing movies, passing #7 Return of the King and #8 The Passion of the Christ over the weekend. It has made $378 million so far. Next up: Spider-Man ($404 million).

UPDATE: AP article here.

Becky and Butter both have such pretty eyes. :)

(More kitten pics here.)

In case anyone doubts that the Electoral College has its problems, and that those problems tend to favor Republicans in the current political climate, I would like to point out a few statistics that I uncovered while researching this topic over the weekend to prove a point to Becky’s brother, Casey.

First off, take a look at the 11 “red states” that make up the heart of the solid Republican Mountain West and Great Plains: Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma. Combined, they have a population of 18,671,566.

Now take a look at New York state. It has a population of 18,976,457. Almost identical — actually just over 300,000 more.

Well, guess what, folks? New York has 33 electoral votes. Those eleven states have a combined total of 52.

Another way of looking at it: compare the Red Eleven with California, which has 54 electoral votes, just two more than their total, but 33,871,648 people, almost twice as many. Cali has 627,235 people per presidential elector; the eleven aforementioned states have 359,069 people per elector. Wyoming, the most overrepresented state in the union, has 164,594 people per elector — barely a fourth of California’s total. That’s right, Wyomingans are almost four times better represented in the Electoral College than are Californians.

One last statistic. George W. Bush won 30 states in 2000; Al Gore won 20, plus the District of Columbia. Bush won the electoral vote, 271-267. (Well, 266 because of that one D.C. elector, but let’s ignore her for the moment.) If we were to eliminate the electoral votes which are based on the states’ representation in the Senate (as well as D.C.’s two “Senate”-based electors) and use only the “House-based” electoral count, Al Gore would have won the 2000 election, 225 to 211.

Pretty interesting, huh?

The solstice is at 5:57 PM MST (8:57 EDT) today.

I just had a nerdy brainstorm. Okay, so the Constitution mandates that the president is chosen by the Electoral College, but as for the manner of choosing the electors, it says only that each state’s legislature must decide how to do that, right? Well, couldn’t we effectively switch to a popular-vote-based system, without amending the Constitution, simply by convincing enough state legislatures to allocate all of their states’ electors to the winner of the national popular vote?

Of course, this would require that we actually have an official body of some sort that determines the offical national popular-vote tally. But in theory, as long as at least 270 electoral votes’ worth of states agreed to abide by that official body’s result, the popular-vote winner would be guaranteed to win the presidency! Right?

The New York Times reviewer is not terribly fond of Bill Clinton’s new autobiography, “My Life”:

The book, which weighs in at more than 950 pages, is sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull — the sound of one man prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel of history. …

“My Life” reads like a messy pastiche of everything that Mr. Clinton ever remembered and wanted to set down in print; he even describes the time he got up at 4 a.m. to watch the inaugural ceremonies for Nigeria’s new president on TV. There are endless litanies of meals eaten, speeches delivered, voters greeted and turkeys pardoned. There are some fascinating sections about Mr. Clinton’s efforts to negotiate a Middle East peace agreement (at one point, he suggests that Yasir Arafat seemed confused, not fully in command of the facts and possibly no longer at the top of his game), but there are also tedious descriptions of long-ago political debates in Arkansas over utility regulation and car license fees . There are some revealing complaints about missteps at the FBI under Louis Freeh’s watch, but there are also dozens of pointless digressions about matters like zombies in Haiti and ruins in Pompeii.

Heh. Chris plans to read it anyway.

This Wednesday morning, in the wee hours, there might be an active meteor shower. Or there might not. Forecasters aren’t sure. But they know this: if there is a good shower, the best place to watch it will be western North America — hey, that’s where I live! :) Stay tuned.

In other space news, on Monday morning the first non-government manned spaceflight will commence in Mojave, CA, when SpaceShipOne is launched into sub-orbit. Blogger Dale Amon is there.

My iPhoto Library was becoming overwhelmed with cute photos of our cats and dog, so I figured I’d better post a few of them. :)

Butter cuddles with Becky and Hugh Manatee.

Sasha yawns.

Toby dances with Becky.
(UPDATE: Due to Toby’s crucifix-like appearance, this photo may also be referred to as The Passion of the Kitty.)

Robbie listens intently for any sign he might get a treat.

More cat & dog photos here! Also included are a bunch of recent photos from the dog park. Enjoy!

Saw The Terminal. Liked it; didn’t love it. I can understand why people said the moviemakers were confused about whether to make it a drama or a comedy. The first half felt like a comedy, and was quite good; the second half felt like a drama, and dragged on a bit. The acting was excellent (I love Tom Hanks), but despite the strong concept, the plot was somewhat lacking, and sort of went off the rails toward the end. Still, an enjoyable film. I give it three out of five shillelaghs.

More later. Off to the dog park now.

UPDATE: I am refining the Irish Trojan movie-review scale slightly, because I realize I’ve been too generous to a number of films this summer, and my golden-shillelagh ratings are thus getting a bit out of whack. So I’m downgrading Troy from 4 to 3 1/2 shillelaghs, Van Helsing from 1 to 1/2 shillelagh, and The Day After Tomorrow from 4 to 2 1/2 shillelaghs (I mean, c’mon; I loved it, but it sucked :).

Shrek 2 stays at 4 1/2 shillelaghs. And for the record, if I had been using this rating system when I saw the Lord of the Rings movies, Return of the King and Fellowship of the Ring both would have gotten 5 shillelaghs; The Two Towers would have gotten 4 1/2.

You know, I have to admit, I feel a certain jealousy of doctrinaire liberals and conservatives. It must be nice to be certain that you’re right all the time. Ignorance is bliss, they say, but so is arrogance. If you have the courage of your convictions — and your convictions include the unwavering belief that you are right and your opponents are wrong — you may (or may not) be a fool, but at worst you’re a confident fool. And at least psychologically, that has to count for something.

As for me, I find that open-mindedness can be agonizing. Honestly, it sucks to be utterly unsure whether I’m right about stuff. Fact is, there are a lot of smart people in this world, with a lot of different opinions, and it can be damn frustrating to find myself bouncing from one argument to another, finding merit in many of them and certainty in none.

For example, I want to believe that, certain missteps aside, we are pursuing basically the right course in the war on terror. And I’ve read plenty of things that suggest we are. But then I read something like this, and I wonder.

And don’t tell me it’s the Guardian, liberal media bias, blah blah blah, because that’s not the point. The point is, how do you sort out the truth from well-thought-out and honestly believed but ultimately incorrect claims? If you look at everything through a particular ideological lens, it’s easy — you believe the claims that go along with your worldview and discard the ones that don’t. But if you’re trying to logically deduce right and wrong without regard to ideology, it’s tough to have confidence in your answers when the issues are so complex. It’s frustrating to no end.

Okay, that’s my rant for the day. And with that, I’m going to sleep.

Amid all my obsessive, flood-the-zone blogging about the Transit of Venus and the Ronald Reagan memorials earlier this month, I never got around to posting my opinion of the new Harry Potter movie. I saw it the weekend it came out (of course), and liked it a lot. The time-travel sequence at the end was especially well done. I’m not sure exactly how many shillelaghs to give it — I want to see it at least once more before deciding that — but suffice it to say, it will do quite well on the Irish Trojan movie-review scale. It’s a good film.

Prisoner of Azkaban is, in fact, the best of the three Potter movies so far, IMHO. Of course, it’s a better book too, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s a better movie. But it’s more than just that. The way it was made, it feels more like a real movie. I think the new director did an excellent job in that sense. Don’t get me wrong, I greatly enjoyed the first two [”TROLL IN THE DUNGEON!!!” -ed.], but at the same time, they felt sort of like cartoons with live actors in them. This reviewer, quoted on the movie-review meta-site Rotten Tomatoes, pretty much hit the nail on the head: “The third Harry Potter movie is the first one that actually looks and feels like a movie, rather than a staged reading with special effects.” And so did this reviewer: “Not only is this the best Harry Potter movie, it is the first Harry Potter movie that actually qualifies as cinema.”

The next movie you might get to read my opinion of is The Terminal, the Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks vehicle that opened today (er, yesterday… Friday). I hope to see it this weekend — though, alas, Becky is less eager, so we shall see. I also hope to see Shrek 2 for a third time :), but you already know I loved that one.

As long as we’re on the topic of movies, here’s a handy list of links to recent movie reviews in the Brendansphere. Some I’ve linked to before, some I haven’t, but I figured it would be useful to put them all together in one place. So here goes:

The Day After Tomorrow: Tim, Becky, Me, Me again

Van Helsing: Me, Becky

Troy: Me, Becky, Chris

Shrek 2: Me, Tim

Ella Enchanted: Becky

Kill Bill Volume 2: Adrienne

Laws of Attraction: Becky

Super Size Me: Becky

P.S. I’m using this post to finally start my long-needed “Movies & TV” category. I will gradually add past posts that belong in this category, many of which are currently in “News: Miscellaneous” or some other inappropriate place.

P.P.S. Technically, the category is called “Entertainment: Movies & TV.” Unfortunately, that makes it a rather long name. Five gold stars (er, shillelaghs) to anyone who can think of a shorter word that could be used as a substitute meta-category title for entertainment-related posts (encompassing such things as TV, movies, books, music, etc.).